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New Enhancements to the LexisNexis® services
Review the most recent enhancements to the LexisNexis® services here.
Finding Legislative History for Federal Taxation
Taxation is an area of law that is subject to frequent legislative changes. Therefore, federal tax matters often require legislative history research. With these changes comes the need to understand legislative intent.
The file Federal Tax Legislation, Congressional Reports, & Bills contains most of the common requests dealing with federal tax legislation going back to 1954. This file contains the following documents dealing with tax legislation:
- Public Laws from 1954
- House Ways & Means Committee Bills and Reports from 1954
- Senate Finance Committee Bills & Reports from 1954
- House-Senate Conference Committee Bills and Reports from 1954
- Joint Committee Prints from 1981 (Selected)
- Joint Committee Bluebooks from 1976
- Proposed Tax and Pension Legislation
You can use any one of several methods to search this file. Which method you use depends mainly upon what information you have regarding a particular piece of legislation and what you are trying to locate. The more specific the information you have, the easier it is to locate within the file.
If you want to locate all the documents that mention a particular subject, use a free-text search. For instance, if you want everything mentioning MACRS (Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System), run the following search: modified accelerated cost recovery system or macrs or m a c r s or m.a.c.r.s.
If you want to locate all the legislative documents related to a particular tax act, run a segment search using the NAME segment. To locate the Tax Reform Act of 1986, run the following search: name(tax reform act of 1986).
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 was enacted as Public Law 99-514. The public law number is located in the cite segment of each document related to the public law, so you can also run the following search: cite(99-514).
If you want a specific committee report, you can run a search for the report number using the cite segment as well. For instance, if you want to locate House Report 99-841, use the following search: cite(99 or 99th w/10 841).
As stated previously, the public law number is included in the cite segment of each document in the file. While that makes it easy to retrieve all the documents related to a particular public law number, it makes it more difficult to retrieve the public law itself. To retrieve Public Law 99-514, modify the search string given earlier by adding "public law" to the search. The search becomes the following: cite(public law 99-514).
The Blue Book is formally known as the General Explanation of a particular tax act. Prior to the 104th Congress, the Blue Book included the name of the tax act in its title. To search for a Blue Book for a tax act prior to the 104th Congress, use the name of the tax act in the search as follows: name(general explanation tax reform act of 1986). For tax acts from the 104th Congress or later include the Congressional session number and both years of the particular Congressional session. A search for the Blue Book for the 105th Congress is as follows: name (general explanation of tax legis! w/10 1998 or 1997 or 105th).
Using
FOCUS™ and Custom Restrictions in a Shepard's® Report
Julie Webster-Matthews, Librarian Relations Consultant, shares one of her favorite tips this week, using FOCUS™ and Custom Restrictions in a Shepard's® report. As Julie explains, one of the most critical components in the legal research process is to uncover cases that cite the case you are relying upon. Shepard's is the 'go-to' resource for that task. Oftentimes your Shepard's results list can be extensive. Your case may be cited hundreds of times. Use the 'FOCUS-Restrict By' feature in Shepard's to streamline results and find relevant cases that contain a specific keyword, phrase, or term-of-art.
- When viewing a Shepard's report, click the 'FOCUS-Restrict By' link at the top of the screen.
- On the next screen, a 'FOCUS terms' box will appear on the right-hand side of the template.
- Type your desired terms in the box, and click on the Apply button at the top of the screen.
- Your new Shepard's results list will consist of cases from the original list that contain the search terms you used in 'FOCUS.' Go directly to a case by clicking on the case name. To get to the exact point in the case where your keywords are mentioned is easy. While viewing the desired case, use the 'Term' feature in the right-hand corner of the lower navigation bar. Use the right arrow to jump to each occurrence of your keywords.
- Your search terms will be highlighted throughout the case for easy detection.
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